With the president going “off script” to praise embattled Fox News personality Bill O’Reilly, Last Week Tonight host John Oliver decided to turn Donald Trump’s ill-advised comments into a teachable moment. And by “teachable moment,” of course, I mean that Oliver’s team tried to buy airtime during The O’Reilly Factor in the hopes of catching the president’s attention while he was presumably watching the program. After all, with all the advertisers pulling out of O’Reilly’s show in droves, there was bound to be plenty of space for Oliver’s commercial. Right?
Wrong, since according to Oliver, Fox News apparently caught wind of Last Week Tonight‘s advertising antics. “We have produced an ad to educate Donald Trump to air during The O’Reilly Factor in New York and D.C. We submitted it to stations Friday, but weirdly, we haven’t heard back from them since. Which is a little surprising because we are one of the only advertisers offering to buy time on his show at the moment.”
“I do hope they don’t reject this ad,” Oliver continued, “but just in case they do, here’s a sneak peak of what we would like the president to see.” In the ad, Last Week Tonight‘s parody of the “Catheter Cowboy” character tells the viewer he uses catheters, and there’s two things he knows: “I don’t like pain when I cath, and repeated, unwanted sexual advances or obscene remarks in the workplace constitute sexual harassment.”
To really send the fake ad’s main point home, however, Oliver’s Catheter Cowboy stands before a bookshelf filled with O’Reilly’s fictional and nonfictional works. “If you’ve got a friend who’s accused of something like that over and over again, I might think twice about defending him. ‘Cause that just contributes to a culture where women don’t want to come forward,” he says before things take a much darker turn: “You are blowing this.”
(Via Entertainment Weekly)